Chapter Text
Time is not water, but the memory of water:
We measure what isn't there
We measure the silence.
We measure the emptiness.
- Charles Wright, “Cicada”
/
Nightmares are the only memories Linhardt has left now.
For the thousandth time, he falls into water. His throat closes up in an instant, seconds shriveling into infinity with each lost breath. Air clogs in his gullet, trying to force its way through, but the now-familiar sensation of deprivation spreads in his chest. Choked, his lungs start their struggle, constricting and expanding in vain. His thoughts, mere shapeless forms, flash in his mind like vignettes: a towering building with green fields, a bright blue sky over blood-red ground, and someone’s widened eyes, slightly out of focus.
Before he could cling onto any of these images long enough for them to make any sense, his lungs lose his last breath.
Eyes bulge.
Limbs seize, and then muscles unfurl in a defeated symphony.
Linhardt’s mouth falls open in a silent, strangled gasp —
And water rushes in a deluge as the river overtakes his lungs, filling every crevice, rushing into the four chambers of his heavy heart. The blood on his fingers leave red ribbons as his hands now slacken. His dark green hair drifts past his ears, tendrils reaching towards the surface, knotted around his wrists. His vision flickers, the surface above drifting farther away, a carpet of muffled light piercing through the encroaching gloom.
As his heart falters and fails, his body a silent ghost now drifting silently down into the bottom of the river, Linhardt thinks of a last thought.
A name.
Byleth.
Forceful, honest eyes, always partially covered with strands of the prettiest, gentlest green hair. A pair of hands, flashing in quick blurs like a picture out of focus. His own name - Linhardt - uttered in a low murmur. These all fade one by one as the water steals his memories the moment they enter his mind, until all that’s left is merely a breathless name, once again.
Byleth — my love.
It is almost a relief when Linhardt closes his eyes to die.
/
Fodlan is biting cold in the winter.
“It’s snowing,” Caspar is exclaiming, his nose pressed up against the windowpane. His eyes are wide with childlike wonder, his awed exhale frosting the glass with his breath. Turning around, he gestures frantically with both arms at the white landscape beyond their windows. “The first snow of the season, Linhardt! Look! Look at that!”
Perched behind the counter sits a green-haired boy of slender built and delicate features, dressed in a bundle of wool scarf and dark grey robes. His fingers are clutched around a quill, the desk before him an assortment of parchment and books splayed open at random intervals. Illustrations of time rifts and quantum physics graphs stare back up from the pages, now abandoned as Linhardt focuses his attention on the snow.
“Huh. Yeah — snow.”
Huge, fat flakes drift down in an unhurried pace outside their store’s window. The street they’re located on tonight is lit by streetlights, casting a soft glow through the dark. It bathes everyone in a warm yellow, people’s silhouettes coming into gentle focus for a clear second before their bag rustles, their laughter rings, and they continue into the fading night.
Even Linhardt has to admit it is a lovely sight — but repetitive after a while, and cold nonetheless. He blinks, stares for a few more seconds, and then returns to his admittedly more interesting pursuit of time-space historical archiving. Not that he doesn’t enjoy snow, only that he never understood humans’ fascination with their inherent romanticism of the weather. He considers himself more a man of pure science and occasional alchemical whimsy.
Caspar, however, is clearly one of those romantics.
“Lin! Lin, look, you didn’t look long enough earlier - ah, I want to play in the snow, Lin. Lin?” Caspar steps closer, now waving a frantic hand under Linhardt’s gaze, his fingers interrupting Linhardt’s dedicated reading. He is leaning so far over the counter he could fall over, his body twitching excitedly. “Lin, hey, you listening?”
Rolling his eyes, Linhardt settles his quill down with a clatter and shoots Caspar a weary look. “No, go away.”
Caspar pretends to hear none of what Linhardt has said, and chirps instead, “there’s no more customers, wanna go hang with me? We can walk outside - maybe buy some Christmas stuff, I kinda want those hampers - or ooh, we could get baked treats!”
“Or,” Linhardt replies, firm, “I could just finish reading Copernicus’s book in peace if you leave me alone.” He peers down longingly at his first edition copy of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, having read about a third of it. Heavenly spheres’ relative positions in a heliocentric theory sounds way better than baked treats, however tasty Adrestian pastries may be.
Besides, the cold only made Linhardt want to stay indoors more than anything.
“Oh, Lord.” Caspar sighs. He resents how Linhardt can be an immovable object when he wants to. “Be a nerd then.”
Linhardt shrugs. “Happily.”
“Who is this Cooperningus guy anyway? Sounds pretentious.”
Another shrug. “You wouldn’t want to know, so why ask?”
Exasperated, Caspar throws his hands up in the air in flailing frustration. “You know, people usually go outdoors for the first snow of the season. They say it’s good luck if you do?”
Linhardt pauses, as if pretending to consider the notion, before decisively shaking his head. “Snow is a natural weather phenomena where moist balls of condensed water falls and hinders normal movement. There’s no luck, just a change of season.” He starts to settle back into reading, letting out a tiny yawn. “Also, this weather is perfect for a nap.”
“Fine, I give up,” Caspar groans. He shoves away from the counter, grumbling. “You can go nap all you want, but at least let me go out there. The store’s empty, and I can take turns closing up tomorrow instead.”
Raising his eyebrows slightly, Linhardt flicks his gaze up at Caspar. “Ah, I see. Is this about that girl from the bakery you mentioned? Someone named Hilda?”
Caspar’s face blushes a bright pink. “What, uh-”
“Is she why you’ve also been slacking off lately?”
“I didn’t slack off.”
Shrugging his shoulders, Linhardt points at a heap of chains and jewels in the corner of his desk. “You just broke another necklace today.”
“That’s— it’s because I have crazy strong core strength, you know I don’t know my own strength—”
“Mhm, and is she also the reason why we’ve had donuts and assorted tarts for breakfast all week long?”
For a few seconds, Caspar’s mouth opens and closes, repeatedly, as the red on his cheeks deepen. “No?”
“Why are you asking me?” Linhardt blinks.
“No. I mean - I just happen to love donuts, alright?” Caspar pauses, sucking in his cheeks as he studies Linhardt’s face intensely for a moment.
Something in Caspar’s gaze unnerves Linhardt - how the younger’s eyes soften in understanding, and suddenly Linhardt feels urgently seen, as if his skin and vessels are translucent.
“Wait. You’re being like, super snarky today. Did you have another one of your nightmares again?”
Linhardt’s eyelashes flutter. His gaze slams shut, eyes glazed over. As always, at the mention of his nightmares, his spine immediately tenses. In the hollow under his tongue, he thought he could taste the water flooding down, down, down into his lungs. His nightmares have always had the same effect on him, no matter how many nights, and he tried to convince himself it was all in his mind.
But his body remembered.
Gauging Linhardt’s instant reaction, Caspar’s expression colors with regret. He moves forward to clasp a hand on Linhardt’s arm. “Lin, I’m sorry.”
Loss strangles Linhardt’s throat, and the room suddenly feels too tight, his world shrinking rapidly. His next words come out a little thin. “It’s okay. Nothing a donut from the bakery couldn’t fix.” He looks at Caspar, and the other boy nods in understanding.
“Alright, stay put,” Caspar warns, but they both know it’s ineffectual. Linhardt barely ever ventures out of the store. The blue-haired boy grabs his plaid scarf, wallet, and phone at lightning speed before waving over his shoulder, tumbling out of the door with promises of pastries.
Chuckling at Caspar’s enthusiasm, Linhardt slowly heaves himself off the chair and stands to close the open door. Flakes of snow have drifted inside, sprinkling the doorstep like powdered sugar. He takes a slow minute to linger in the doorway, watching the stream of people pass him by without a glance. His scarf is thick and wards off the cold well, and he reluctantly admits that the crisp breeze feels sweet on his face.
In the night sky, the moon is but a sliver, partly covered with wisps of clouds. Sparse moonlight falls on the street, which flickers in warmth and festive Christmas lights. A babble of conversation rises up from raucous groups of friends, families with excited toddlers, and loving couples crowding up the sidewalks. They peer into storefronts and sit on benches, sharing treats and hot beverages in the cold. With the magical wards around his store, no one is able to see Linhardt — and he likes this, being accustomed to the invisibility. It does get a little lonely, this supposed freedom, but it’s the only way he knows how to live so far.
For a quiet moment, Linhardt allows himself to ponder if he’s truly alive. His heart is now a deadweight muscle, limp and discarded. It has not worked for as long as he’s existed. He knows that, at some point in his previous life, he must’ve had a heartbeat. That he’d had blood pumping through his veins to sustain him.
Linhardt isn’t sure of the reason behind his heart malfunctioning. Ever since he woke up from death a thousand years ago, it has not beat even once. It stopped, like halted hands on the clock, somewhere between his past life and this current one. He shouldn’t even be alive now, by all scientific means and purposes - but time is made of water, and it bends. It doesn’t touch him the way it does others.
It isolates.
Sighing, Linhardt shakes himself out of his reverie, wanting to delve into his research as much as he can before Caspar returns. He is about to reach out for the doorknob, fingers outstretched, when a voice stops him cold.
“Wait!”
/
A thousand years ago, Linhardt fell into death — and discovered that the darkness has teeth.
Jagged, sharp teeth sink into his back, his head hitting a rock surface hard. Hard enough that he should feel pain, but his body is strangely numb. Even as he sits up, his soldier’s garment soaked through with a mixture of blood, gore, and river water, his wounds no longer bleed. He blinks, taking in his surroundings slowly: a large chamber, floating seemingly in darkness.
Beneath him, a pile of rubble juts out of the ground. He’d fallen onto the sharp pile of rocks earlier, his head crushing a lain pillar with a near-faded depiction of a battlefield. Both above and below lie inky blackness, darker than any night skies Linhardt has ever seen. His stomach clenches tight, and he shifts forward slightly to avoid possibly dropping off into the nothingness.
Aside from these remnants, the only other objects lie across the wide expanse, on the opposite side of the floating cavern. He only had time to take in a throne built of similar stone material as the floor and an outline of long green hair surrounded by floating ribbons before a voice rings out from the figure herself.
“Well,” the figure remarks. “It seems you are finally awake. My name is Sothis, the goddess of Time.” She pauses, leaning forward slightly into the light so her features are now visible. “Hm. Funny, I think I’ve said this exact sentence before.”
Stunned, Linhardt could only watch with disbelief as Sothis tilts her head, staring straight back at him. His stomach churns, reality twisting in his mind. For years he had read about Sothis, pouring through religious texts in Garreg Mach’s library in his studious quest of theological knowledge. She had seemed like a myth, like a bedtime story you tell a child to usher them into slumber.
But here she is, alive and in corporeal form. Talking to him, as if she knows who he is.
Linhardt has never felt more insignificant and confused, but his scholar’s curiosity burns. Besides, this must be a dream.
Right? This can’t possibly be real?
That last thought pushes him to finally voice out his question: “what is going on?” He narrows his eyes, trying to rationalize as he studies Sothis’ face. “Who are you, really? Is this the afterlife? Have you come to test if I am deemed worthy enough to enter heaven or hell?”
It is a logical reasoning, considering the notion of the two worlds exist in many biblical texts. Sothis, however, merely sighs. “You mortals and your little, made-up tales. There is no heaven nor hell — just existence, and the absence of it.” She flicks her gaze up and down Linhardt’s blood-soaked frame, calculating. “I knew it would be you he would ultimately choose to save, out of everyone.”
“He?” Linhardt frowns.
“He always has loved you that much,” Sothis sighs, rolling her eyes as if in annoyance. But there is a splintered sort of hurt behind her gaze, and she sinks into a quiet reverie, mulling something over. A few seconds pass until she decides to shrug the remark off, her hand casting a dismissive figure as if swatting a bug away. “Oh, well. It’s best you don’t know for now. It’ll probably only cause you pain.”
But Linhardt already is in pain — or was. He gazes down at his crimson stains on his hands, his gear, and remembers the burning water he’d tumbled into. Staring back up into Sothis’ face, he feels wisps of fear beginning to take hold of him.
Something is dangerously, catastrophically wrong.
“If you really are a goddess, why didn’t you just let me die?” Linhardt blurts out, his stomach piercing with dread as he watches Sothis’ eyebrows raise at his outburst. "Why did you pull me back here?"
“Oh, how brash!” The goddess chides. “That’s an ungrateful thing to say to someone who saved you.”
“But — ...I wanted to die.” Linhardt takes in a deep, trembling breath. “I can’t — I don’t remember much of my last moments, except for water and...this strong sensation of wanting to just die. And now you, a goddess, are talking about having saved me, and I’ve only seen you in books before and someone once said —” He flinches as a sudden, unexpected memory comes rushing back.
I carry her heart within me, a warm voice echoes in his head.
“Yes?” Sothis’ interest is piqued. She leans even further forward. “Who said what?”
“I’m...not sure.” For some reason, Linhardt doesn’t want to share this memory with her. It is precious, he could sense it. Instead, he whips his chin back up, demanding, “are you even real? This could just be a hallucination — I’ve read about those, when brains lose oxygen and reality warps into fantasy before a person dies. You might not even be here, perhaps.”
Sothis scoffs out an indignant laugh, rising from her throne. “You sure are an interesting one, mortal.” She lifts herself into the air slowly, rising and floating a few inches, throwing her arms out to the side.
As Linhardt watches with widened eyes, Sothis begins to chant. It sounds foreign to Linhardt’s ears, lilting and cold. The words are unrecognizable, and almost sharp, somehow. A shape begins to materialize between them, a symbol Linhardt knows in an instant. He had forgotten exactly how his life ended, but he remembers what that life had been devoted to: Crests, symbols, the relics of gods and goddesses and everything to do with Fodlan’s theology.
Sothis, he had studied, is known as the goddess of Time — as the figure had proclaimed herself.
Or, alternatively, the Beginning.
This symbol is mastery over time itself, he remembers himself explaining, although he doesn’t remember who he’d told this to. It means you can bend, reverse, or...you can even stop time.”
Something begins to change in Linhardt the moment Sothis finishes her chanting. It’s indiscernible, at first, like a gathering of waves in slow ripples. But after Sothis’ lips purses shut and the spell subsides, Linhardt feels almost reborn. His vision wavers, the edges of his form gently warping in and out of form, and his heart —
He couldn’t feel his heartbeat anymore.
Linhardt’s eyes widen, his head whipping up to face Sothis in terror. “What —”
Sothis is looking down at him, still floating. She holds her palms up, slowly, as if in disbelief herself. Her eyes look sad; a contemplative, ancient regret. “Sometimes…” she murmurs, but the room is cavernous and her soft voice carries over. “Sometimes I wonder if this power is a curse or a blessing.” Her gaze travels downwards to Linhardt, and her sadness shifts into something harder. “And you. A mortal, with such heavy burden on your shoulders now.”
Linhardt’s fear had branched now, spiking his stomach, spreading down to his very toes. His thoughts are red-hot, a sharp stabbing sensation in his windpipe, and he is trying to make sense of Sothis’ words and at the same time, make sense of the fact that his heart had stopped beating. He should be dead. He is dead.
Isn't he?
He doesn’t feel anything in him shift, but he knew he wasn’t the same: it was a foreign sensation, as if he was now in a body that was someone else’s. and he stares down at his hands, his torso, his legs. His breath hitches, his blood zipping hot.
“What did you do?” Linhardt asks, his voice a tremor, and a funny sensation travels through him for a quick second. When he looks up at Sothis again, his thoughts feel sluggish and murky, like peering through stained glass windows. “Wh— how did I get here again?”
Sothis’ gaze examines Linhardt with a precision like that of a scientist’s. It reminds Linhardt of his own curiosity whenever he’d study more about Crests, and it unnerves him, how much pity there is in Sothis’ stare. “You do not remember of any battles? Nor of any...past memories?”
Linhardt opens his mouth to refuse right away, considering it unthinkable for his razor-sharp memory to have disappeared just like that, but —
“I…” Linhardt’s eyes widen with terror. "Wait—"
There is nothing.
There is nothing, not a single laugh or touch or face comes to mind. He breathes in sharply, starts scrambling even further into the recesses of his mind, but the gnawing panic grows grows grows and he still can’t remember, he knows he should, and yet all he sees are vague shadows of a life he’d lived.
Impossible.
“Give them back!” Linhardt screams at Sothis, his voice ripping straight out of his throat like a mangled animal’s. It was the first time he’d lost his composure this badly, but any decorum when facing a goddess has now been forgotten. It’s replaced now by a blazing, growing terror crawling up his spine, and a sick feeling in the back of his throat — a feeling like he’d just lost one of the most important people he’d known. Someone he never wanted to let go. He sees a flash of fingers curled under a book by the candlelight, and then that’s gone, too. It was there, and in the next second, it blinked out of existence.
“Give my memories back! What have you done with them?” He yells again, panting for breath as he draws nearer to Sothis. His blood races, and he waits for his heart to pound hard against his sternum until he remembers that he has none now. “And give me back my heart. Give them back. Give them back.”
Sothis merely floats, unreachable. Her face is deeply troubled, but holds a disassociation possessed by that of an immortal: distant, far away. Already, Linhardt sees Sothis flickering in and out, a candle flame in the wind. As her form begins to morph into the light, crumbling into air, he instinctively lunges forward, his feet stumbling before hitting the ground running. If he still had a heart, it would’ve raced, but his chest is strangely silent, even as he’s rushing across the hall to a silent, fading God.
Sothis only watches him with pity and something else: somber, but apprehensive. Like watching tragedy strike but in hindsight.
“Wait!” The word is torn out of Linhardt’s windpipe in a desperate yell, an invisible hand in his throat. His mind feels wrong, his panic now crawling up and shoving its way into every single vein until he feels like he’s burning up inside, about to implode. “What did you—”
But already the tiles under his feet are starting to give way, and Linhardt feels himself fall once again.
/
When next he wakes, Linhardt finds himself lying on a wooden floor.
He is spitting water out of his mouth, muscles trembling and lungs violently gasping for air. He is bare, the air freezing on his skin, and his hand reaches out for anyone, for help — only to close around a tiny rock. He blinks, dazed, and whips his head up to find that he is in a tiny cottage, surrounded by piles of Crest stones.
Frantically combing through his memories, he finds a gnawing blank slate. His mind inflates with panic, eyes widening in horror as realization settles in. Nothing exists, only his name — Linhardt — and another’s.
This other name pulses deep in his chest, beating steadily like the heart he once had.
Byleth.